Any reason to upgrade from 1Password 6 for Mac to subscription service?

rakeshs

Hi all,

I bought the 1Password 6 for Mac license but have hardly scratched the surface when it comes to it's functionality, to date.
In my new business venture, I will be dealing with a lot of important, financially sensitive online accounts and will probably be accessing them using my iPhone and iPad too.

1) Is there any significant advantage to changing to the 1Password subscription service?
2) Will the 1Password 6 for Mac (desktop) continue to be updated moving forward? Is support likely to be discontinued at any point?
3) Is 2FA included in 1Password 6 for Mac?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Rakesh

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1Password Version: 6
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: OSX
Sync Type: Not Provided

Corey_C

Hi there @rakeshs :)
Welcome to 1Password. Let me see if I can answer some of those questions for you.

1) Is there any significant advantage to changing to the 1Password subscription service?

There are plenty of advantages to a 1Password.com subscription, most notably, access to the 1Password app on all your devices with seamless syncing between them all. Without the subscription, you would have to buy a separate license for each platform and set up syncing through a third party service, such as dropbox. With a subscription, all the apps for all your devices are included and syncing happens automatically. All the benefits of a Membership subscription are outlined here:

What are the benefits of a 1Password membership?

2) Will the 1Password 6 for Mac (desktop) continue to be updated moving forward? Is support likely to be discontinued at any point?

AgileBits has announced that they will continue to support standalone vaults in the future. Version 6 will continue to get updates as they are needed and worked on but, same as any other program, version 7 will eventually be released and if you wish to upgrade to that, a new license will need to be purchased if you don't have a subscription as licenses are per version/platform. If your question is whether or not standalone, non subscription versions will stop being supported anytime soon, then no. I don't expect version 6 specifically to stop being supported any time soon either.

3) Is 2FA included in 1Password 6 for Mac?

If you mean 2FA in order to decrypt your 1Password data, then no. The reason for this would be better explained by a member of the AgileBits than me as they will know the whole story. But as I understand it, and this could be wrong, they're working on some form of implementation but will not add it until they find one that doesn't compromise the core security of the service. It's also not as necessary for 1Password due to the Master Password + Secret Key combination that exists for subscription accounts and the fact that, when opening 1Password, you're not authenticating to a server but rather decrypting data that already exists on your device. There's plenty of talk about 2FA around on this forum and, again, a member of the AgileBits team would be better for this question. That's just how I understand it.

1Password can, however, be used as a 2FA client for some sites as it does support one time passwords.

Hope that helps clear some things up. Hopefully I'm not entirely wrong about the 2FA part, but I'm sure an Agile Bits Team Member will be around to elaborate on and/or correct what I've said.

Cheers :)
Corey

AGAlumB

@rakeshs: Great questions! I'll answer them in reverse order so I don't sound like I'm ripping off Corey_C here. ;)

The standalone 1Password app cannot use multifactor authentication because it doesn't authenticate with anything; it's an encrypted database on disk. 1Password.com accounts, since they do authenticate with the server, are capable of additional features like this. The 1Password Teams Pro plan uses Duo authentication as a beta feature, and we may bring something like this to other plans as well.

But it's important that 1Password's fundamental security not depend on authentication. Mutlifactor authentication doesn't contribute to encryption, and while it protects against some attacks, it can be bypassed (for example, you don't have to do this each time you access your accounts that use something like TOTP when the device is already recognized). 1Password's security is based on encryption, since that cannot be bypassed by someone stealing your device, capturing a one-time password, or performing a person-in-the-middle attack. Instead, 1Password.com uses your Secret Key to encrypt the data along with your Master Password, so that both are needed to decrypt it. This way, even if someone steals your device or breaks into our server, they cannot break into your data.

Regarding 1Password 6, it's very much still under active development, but that will end at some point in the future, just as it has for versions 3, 4, etc. At that point, you can purchase an upgrade for the new version if you wish, or, if you have a 1Password.com membership, it will be included.

As far as advantages of 1Password.com, everything Corey_C directed you to above applies, but ultimately it depends most on your specific needs. In the case of a business, 1Password Teams has a lot of more advanced features for securely sharing data both with colleagues (which can be invited as team members) and others you might need to collaborate with (which can be added as guests) to some extent in your work. If you'll let me know a bit more about what you're doing (or what you'd like to do) with 1Password to make your job easier, I can help you get a better sense of if it's worth migrating at this time. :)